Betty Tompkins

About The Artist

Tompkins’s oeuvre has never demurred from provocative subject matter; the artist’s ongoing Fuck Paintings (1969-1974; reprised in 2003) center on tightly cropped photorealistic images of sexual intercourse. According to the artist, “My first husband had this great collection of porn and I was looking at it one day and thought: if you take out the heads and legs—all this boring stuff—and get down to the money shot, this is beautiful…really formally beautiful.” Highly sexualized imagery and language have since become ubiquitous in mainstream culture and have shifted the context and reaction surrounding the Fuck Paintings, once dismissed as too explicit and because of Tompkins’s position as a female artist with a sex-positive attitude. It wasn’t until the paintings’ presentation at the Lyon Biennale in 2003, that the work received an extraordinary reception and established Tompkins at the forefront of first generation feminist art.

Work

Exhibitions

The artists in this exhibition reach across generations. Judy Chicago, Cheryl Donegan, Martine Gutierrez, Cindy Hinant, Narcissister, Tschabalala Self, and Betty Tompkins each engage with feminism from different perspectives, acting as mirrors of those who came before as well as for the practitioners who will come after.